Environment

The X-IFU Consortium strives to limit its environmental impact. Since 2019, we have focused our efforts on reducing the travel footprint related to X-IFU meetings.

• Reduce the number of physical consortium meetings (from twice to once a year);
• Make the best use of people’s travels by organizing side-meetings and thus reduce the need for additional travels;
• Select the site of minimum emission for physical meetings;
• Switch to virtual meetings when possible;
• Raise the awareness of its members.

We are already looking into strengthening our environmental commitments and planning the next steps. There is a growing support in the scientific community for such initiatives and we are hoping that our experience will encourage others, individuals and organisations, to take actions as well.

Thanks to this tool, it was estimated that the yearly travel footprint of the Consortium was around 500 tons of Co2-eq. Our objective is to halve this amount. It has also allowed us to evaluate the site of minimum emissions for the organization of future meetings. With these data, we can better select the next location to gather our consortium members.

The travel footprint calculator is free to use here.

• Estimating, monitoring and minimizing the travel footprint associated with the development of the Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05603
• The carbon footprint of large astronomy meetings (Nature Astronomy): rdcu.be/b61Or
• The Climate Issue (Nature Astronomy): www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01216-9
• Group Astronomers for Planet Earth: https://astronomersforplanet.earth